Most of Gemma's time is currently spent on the Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster, and she is also beginning a new project on literature and drugs.
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
PhD English Literature. (University of Manchester). Thesis title: ‘Between Aesthetics and Politics: Music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner’.
MA Postcolonial Literature (University of Manchester).
BA (Hons) English Literature (University of Manchester).
Most of Gemma's research to date examines music in literature. She is interested in the real-world, political significance of seemingly abstracted things like musical and literary forms, and find that music plays a crucial role in investigations of language, rational thought and ideology among modernist and contemporary novelists. Gemma's first monograph, Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) analyses the use of music among modernists – particularly James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner – as well as contemporary writers Paul Griffiths and Richard Powers. This book seeks to re-shape aesthetic, temporal and political understandings of modernism by showing that music’s ambiguity and abstraction remains key to an enduring, politically-motivated modernist desire to use aesthetic forms to engage with otherness, and reveal the limitations of rational thought.
Gemma often uses continental philosophies of music to unpack the political implications of aesthetic forms. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she's explored aesthetic and material approaches to music, popular music, ideology, opera and stream of consciousness narrative technique in writing by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and E.M. Forster.
Gender and sexuality are always close at hand, especially in her work on Warner and Forster. Gemma has examined the relative marginalisation of Sylvia Townsend Warner when compared with other writers of the early- to mid-twentieth century, and has written on Forster’s critique of purity-feminism in Maurice.
Most of Gemma's time at the moment is spent on the Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E. M. Forster. She's working on the editorial board for this project, and editing Where Angels Fear to Tread. This project addresses the fact that there is, at present, no modern scholarly edition of Forster’s work. In this sense, Forster is behind such lesser-known, early twentieth-century authors such as Dorothy Richardson and Wyndham Lewis. The Cambridge Edition will become the primary scholarly editions of Forster worldwide, and her edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread will make archive and manuscript material available to scholars around the world for the first time.
Monographs
Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
Scholarly Editing
E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, ed. Gemma Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024). [In progress.]
Journal articles
‘Music, Noise and the First World War in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End’. Modernist Cultures 12.1 (April 2017), 59-77.
‘Music in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Howards End: The Conflicting Presentation of Nineteenth-Century Aesthetics’. English Literature in Transition 59.4 (May 2016), 493-509.
‘“A beginning rather than an end”: Popular Culture and Modernity in D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr’. Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 4.1 (December 2015), 119-139.
Book chapters
‘Classical Music and Literature’ in Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 92-113.
‘Women in and out: Forster, Florence, Feminism and Social Purity’ in Critical Essays on E. M. Forster’s Maurice, ed. Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 52-74.
‘Popular Culture’ in The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts, ed. Catherine Brown and Susan Reid (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 145-159.
‘The Treatise on Harmony: Ezra Pound as Music Theorist’ in Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Roxana Preda (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 347-358.
Reviews
Vincent Sherry, ed., The Cambridge History of Modernism, ed. (Cambridge University Press: 2016). Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies.
Cecelia Bjorken-Nyberg, The Player Piano and the Edwardian Novel (Ashgate: 2015). English Literature in Transition 60.1 (2017).
Maroula Joannou, ed., The History of British Women’s Writing, 1920–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan: 2012). Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (2013).
